Slower than me

Amazing news coming in from the UK, is that there is actually a place – placeS, in fact – in the UK which have a slower broadband connection than me. What sort of a godforsaken, Fourth World backwater are we talking about here?
Well, Kent actually. Home to illegal immigrants, the Neanderthal residents of Maidstone and an
ex-girlfriend of mine. Three good reasons (amongst many others) to avoid the place.

And it’s not just a bit slower, either:

Research by broadband comparison website Top10.com found that Railway Hill in Barnham, Kent, had an average download speed of just 0.13Mb per second.

And when I (eventually) got a result from speedtest.net this evening, it was this:

Whoosh, it ain’t – unless you happen to be a Railway Hill resident, then you’ve never seen anything quite this fast before: “Moy Goodnars!” (Note the retracted first element and slight monophthongisation of PRICE vowel there – that’s Kent for you.)

Let me be honest here, I could get faster if I wanted. But it would cost a lot of money – an extra R300 a month on top of the R300 I’m already paying for this digital equivalent of amputee tortoises sleepwalking through cold molasses. And so while I had to ask myself whether it was worth paying twice as much to get a speed which is still only around one fifth the UK average, I replied to myself with a firm no.

Broadband is hugely expensive here in SA. It’s a luxury and I’m grateful to have it, but I’m paying through the nose for it as well. For only slightly more than I’m paying for my service, my parents are getting 30 Mb/s, which is shortly to be upgraded (at no extra cost to them) to 40Mb/s. For the non-mathematicians amongst you: yes, that’s 100 times faster download speed than I’m on here. And included in that package is phone line rental and a fair few (most?) phone calls as well.

It’s frustrating that even as prices start to come down and speeds start to go up here, we still find ourselves lagging (no pun intended) further and further behind the “developed” nations.

But then I look at it like this – perhaps, in a way, I’ve traded in affordable, super-fast  internet access for Table Mountain, Kirstenbosch and the Constantia Wine Route; for late night dips in the pool and for Castle Milk Stout and Carling Black Label. And while I might only be able to manage a measly 0.43Mb/s; while it might take me 2 months to download a movie, things could be worse.

Because when I open my curtains tomorrow, I’m not going to be looking at Kent.

Glass half full?

Glass brimming, methinks.

We’ll Live and Die in These Towns

Quota music video time and a favourite of mine from Coventry band The Enemy.
This is We’ll Live and Die in These Towns from 2007.

Lead singer Tom Clarke admits that they were heavily influenced by The Clash, which won’t surprise anyone listening to this who has heard The Clash. He doesn’t admit to being heavily influenced by Richard Hammond from BBC’s Top Gear, despite obviously being his uglier brother.

Funny Man

Another long day, another tired me, another late post. In filling my weekends with housework and family time, I not only miss the opportunity to blog, but also the opportunity to keep up with what’s going on in the world – and the blog fodder that the news provides. This is an issue, so I had to go a couple of days back.

One thing we did catch this weekend was Nik Rabinowitz’s You Can’t Be Serious stand-up show at the Baxter. Very funny guy, with a keen eye for observing and finding the funny in South Africa and South Africanisms. It’s humour I wouldn’t have understood if I hadn’t been here observing the same stuff for seven years.

Here he is on the BBC’s Mock The Week in June last year:

The thing is, though he does the languages thing very well (although the knock knock joke is wearing a little thin now), all he is actually doing in this sketch is repeating the local football commentary. Because yes, that’s exactly what you will hear on a Xhosa radio station when the football in on. And yes, I suppose it’s quite amusing if you’re not used to it.

I can’t help but think, however, that my UK stand-up act would fall flat were I to bring my rendition of some English football commentary and a knock knock joke to South African television.

The Soutpiel conundrum

I get called a lot of names because of this blog. Some are nice, but probably most are not. The less pleasant ones dribble limply into the metaphorical pond, like water off a duck’s back. But there’s one which is fairly regularly used each and every time I make any criticism of South Africa (that being both my home and the country where I pay my taxes) or anything or anyone South African.
That insult is “Soutpiel” – usually abbreviated to “Soutie”.
And it reared its ugly head again after the Zuma v Zapiro post yesterday.

The term is almost exclusively used in a derogatory manner, but when I actually looked up (or asked someone, can’t remember) what it meant several years ago, I almost burst out laughing.
A quick look at the wonderfully-titled Wikipedia page “Alternative names for the British”, tells us:

Another common term in South Africa used mostly by the Afrikaans is Soutie or Sout Piel. This is from the concept that the Brits have one leg in Britain and one leg in South Africa, leaving the penis hanging in the salt water. Sout Piel means Salt Penis (or rather “dick”). However, this term refers more specifically to British people who have settled in South Africa, as they are more likely to be imagined as having one foot in each country than a Briton who is simply visiting as a tourist.

Is that really the best that you can do?

Let’s look at the logistics of this. The distance from South Africa to the UK is about 6000 miles. Don’t ask me how I know that off the top of my head. It’s just a unique talent I have around memorising numbers.
Thus, in calling me a Soutie, you are inferring that when I stand, my feet are about 9656km apart. A ludicrous suggestion, I know, but this is your mind at work here, not mine.
And then, let’s suppose that in standing firm, one foot in Cape Town – possibly Greenmarket Square, I don’t know – and the other in Sheffield at the top of Fargate (next to the Yorkshire Bank), my legs are each at a sturdy, safe angle of 60° to the ground. In your mind, you now have a massive, massive equilateral triangle.
My legs are each stretching 9656km into the sky.
To put that in perspective, the International Space Station is orbiting around my ankles.

Your mind, remember?

The next bit might not be so nice to imagine – depending on how you like to butter your bread – it’s my “piel” and it is – for geometric purposes you understand – descending directly from the apex of the huge triangle created by my legs and the surface of the earth, which I have conveniently assumed is flat. The eagle-eyed mathematicians among you (those that haven’t fainted at the sheer scale and might of what stands before you) have just realised that we now have a right-angled triangle and we can bring our friend Mr Pythagoras into play, theorem in hand.

I hope that you can all remember that Mr P told us that:

(Piel² + 4828²) = 9656²

Which I will helpfully rearrange and solve for you using just a simple pen, an ordinary sheet of A4 paper and a Casio fx-85WA calculator.

To sum up, what you are telling me when you call me a “Soutie”, what you are saying is that
my member is 8363.341km long.
But, you know what they say: “size isn’t important”.  That’s what they tell you, isn’t it? Hmm?

Hmm?

But that’s not all.

While we’ve had a long, hard (careful now) examination of the “piel” portion of the word, there’s still this issue over where my prodigious organ is dangling and getting salty.
There is no ocean between Cape Town and Sheffield. Your only briny options are the horizontal slivers of the Mediterrenean and the English Channel. And my mighty manhood isn’t landing anywhere near either of them.

In fact, consulting any accurate map or globe will show you that it actually comes to rest somewhere close to the city of Tahoua in sandy, landlocked Niger, where it would probably nestle happily amongst the population of just under 100000 and be used as some religious monument or record-breaking sundial.
The closest you come to any saltiness is the fact that gypsum and phosphates are mined in the area.
It sounds like Brakpan. Not great.

So next time you want to come up with a first class insult to put me firmly in my place, I would steer clear of “Soutie”,  if I were you.

It really doesn’t work.

Easy Life

It’s a pleasant 28°C today, although the SouthEaster blowing through made me wonder if Lionel Ritchie was in Cape Town on the weekend back in ’77 when he wrote the hit Breezy Like Sunday Morning. Either way, it doesn’t remind me in any way, shape or form of the Decembers of my youth, but Kpu has been making use of the “rocky-beddy” (Hammock) to get some R&R in the back garden today. I’d have been hypothermic if I’d tried that when I was her age.

Dad’s job was to sit next to her like some sort of colonial servant and rock the hammock gently from side to side as she sang to herself and looked glamorous.

Tough life, hey?